Because doubling down on idiocy has always worked in the past.

I agree. Too much handholding for me, imo. However, if I had a Steamdeck I might use it just for simplicity sake. If I wanted an immutable distro for my desktop I’d choose NixOS, tbh, but that’s on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from Bazzite.

This. I mained Arch for 2 years and still can’t be completely trusted with sudo. Moved to Nobara, would recommend as well. Its a bit more advanced, but you don’t have to touch the command line if you don’t want to and setup is right there step-by-step when you first boot.

I did try Bazzite first. I just couldn’t get used to living the Flatpak life. I know you can force install native packages, but at that point why wouldn’t I just use Nobara, lol.

Friend saw ‘convenience’ and that was it. No more reading, only fists. I thought I was quite neutral. Yes, convenience. I have been known to use a local LLM based on recipes to give me ideas what I could make based on my pantry.

I have a lovely recipe for absolutely delicious chocolate-chip cookies that use pancake mix.

True, true. In this context I mean the LLM craze. The GPU era of AI.

Agreed. Probably where it should have stayed in the first place. Not that its not interesting, just that the scope of AI has widened beyond what it should have.

I’m a hybrid user. I love to use the keyboard, but sometimes I just want to go in a GUI and click click done. It depends on what I need at the time. I love TUIs the most.

Need to move a handful of files over somewhere? Forget dragging a reticle and dropping them all five subdirectories away, I’m going to boot up Midnight Commander, Zoxide over to where I need to go, select and move.

A mass amount of files? Gonna mv those puppies.

Need to move that one piddly file to the next folder down? I’m going to open Dolphin, do a quick move, and call it a day.

However, for anything programming or note-taking, Vim is love. Qutebrowser or Vimium extensions so I can Vim-ify my browser. Vim everything. We don’t need to bring a mouse into that equation.

If I had to make a guess, I say it probably will. The convenience of AI is probably here to stay, but the craze of replacing everything with AI will go out the door.

AI will become exactly what it should have been in the first place: an assistant. Not your friend, not your doctor, not your therapist, not a replacement for artists/authors/programmers, and not inside every piece of tech post 2025. It has a place. That place is over-embellished right now, not to mention unsustainable.

Don’t forget Lutris. It may take a bit more tinkering than Steam, but if you have loose games or use multiple games launchers, Lutris can combine them all into one neat and tidy launcher.

And I rest my case, lol. I don’t even know the difference between init and initramfs. It’s definitely a hole in my knowledge and I should know it going down the line, but I need the right time.

I’m here and there on what I want to learn at any moment. It’s not like I can’t learn, but it’s all about what interests me at the time. I learn things in a scattered manner, which admittedly is a horrible way to learn but its just how my brain works.

I’m a very mid-level Linux user. I use systemd because I’m just not familiar with how init systems actually work. I love that the choice is there, but I think systemd has it’s place with users like me that get confused.

That being said, I did run Dracut on EndeavourOS because it was recommended for that distro. I never dived into it to see what the exact difference was, though I do remember running into some things I needed to do that Dracut did differently. There may come a day when I dive into inits, but for now I’m just happy if my system boots to desktop.

You’re not wrong, though. If you want all your packages to work correctly, you gotta stay up to date. I know some of my packages will break if I go more than a week.

Yesterday I read about RATs becoming more frequent in the AUR in some packages. They predict that they’re going to become more frequent soon. I’m wondering if it might be time to switch my main machine to NixOS now. I may check out Bazzite and Nobara first, though.

However, I guess Arch is doing something to protect against these? It’s going to be part of BumpBuddy.

Yeah, that checks out. I think there’s other ways of doing it, I just never manages to get it working. I’ll have to check again, but I thought KDE had something in the system settings that let you swap versions. I could be just misremembering the kernel swap settings though.

There’s also some nvidia command hoodoo I tried and everything went well except at the end where I wound up with no graphical output at all, lol. I did a lot of messing around on fresh installs until the cord swap finally worked.

Yeah, it does make sense that you can compare them in that sense, but as far as actual system setup goes, I don’t think they’re comparable. Don’t get me wrong, I love NixOS. When I was learning nixlang and setting up everything to be modular and reproducible, I was having a blast.

However, I also had a blast learning Arch and figuring out how my system works the way it does. I’ll be honest, though, NixOS helped me learn how Home was separate from Root. That alone really helped me learn how the general Linux system file hierarchy worked.

But there are also things I would have never learned about Linux if I never messed with Arch, such as essential system symlinks, how they work, and how to use chroot in the live environment to fix broken ones (thanks to a botched Arch update, lol).

If you like it, learn it-use it. All this comparing and inter-distro warring seems pointless. There’s not a distro I’ve used that I haven’t had things I really liked and really hated.

I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.

I’m more in the group of Nix != Arch. They’re just different. I love them both, tbh.

I would like to add that I have never recommended them to beginners. I usually like to recommend Pop!_OS.

I really have been wanting to try Bazzite lately, too.

You should try it.iusearchbtw

I’m not sure how fast the pacman repo updates, but I’m using that plus Syncthing-Fork from F-Droid. I don’t think they’ve dropped 2.0 in there, yet.

Looks like the Arch Syncthing package upstream URL is the official Syncthing and is running 2.0.1. I can now confirm that 1.x from Syncthing-Fork works fine with Syncthing 2.0. I just set it up this morning, oddly enough.

I’ve never really used Ubuntu, but I’m going to agree with others here. If its what you use, it would be better in the sense that it would be much easier for you to give her phone assistance when she needs it, rather than giving her something you’re not used to and possibly having to go over and troubleshoot for her.

If she wants something more in the line with Windows, you could try Kubuntu, but I think the rigging behind KDE is pretty complicated for a casual user. You may want to help her set up the way she wants her desktop to look at first if you go this route. The only other Windows-like desktop is Cinnamon, but Cinnamon-Wayland is still in alpha and once they officially drop it that could make more work for you later.

Admittedly, I have 0 experience with the Unity DE, so that’d be your call if you think you can familiarize it for her.

Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There’s gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.

According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.